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Meanwhile, Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars are putting gasoline vehicles and electric to shame: https://www.timesnownews.com/auto/car-news/article/toyota-mirai-hydroge

Meanwhile, Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars are putting gasoline vehicles and electric to shame: https://www.timesnownews.com/auto/car-news/article/toyota-mirai-hydrogen-car-sets-guinness-world-record-for-longest-range/822571 https://www.timesnownews.com/auto/car-news/article/toyota-mi... Of course, you can't readily buy or charge one yet, but you don't have the battery problem (at all).

snotrockets 4y ago
There were plans in Japan for wide use of hydrogen as the fuel of the future. Japanese car manufacturers aligned on that, but weren’t keen on building the necessary infrastructure. You could lease a hydrogen fuel cell car in CA. There was even a lot of state incentives if you did. But very few fueling stations (iirc, only two in the whole Bay Area)
- martin_bech 4y ago
  Because the infrastructure needed would be bonkers, and creating fuelibg stations is not really a solved problem. You also loose a big amount of energy converting from electric to hydrogen and back. The cars themselves almost always have low storage because the tanks are very big. Hydrogen car performance is also a lot lower then pure EV.
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    The infrastructure needed to create a power grid for people to charge electric vehicles at home would be double-bonkers. Upgrading fueling stations seems much easier than mining all of the copper needed to add all of the extra lines for EV charging, and then upgrading the whole national grid. Supposedly one company has claimed 95% efficiency on creating hydrogen from electrolysis: https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electrolysis/ https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr... Power that by nuclear energy, and it's a green & clean winner.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      There are ancillary benefits to upgrading the grid that retrofitting pipes to pump hydrogen doesn’t bring. Most of America and Europe would do just fine without upgrades, for most of the population. And the jurisdictions touting hydrogen (e.g. Japan) have 70s-era anti-nuke greens in power. Hydrogen is a smart hedge to pursue. But thank goodness it’s mostly Japanese tax dollars doing it.
      - fomine3 4y ago
        Current Japan regime isn't anti-nuclear but they are the regime that encouraged nuclear plants. Now nuclear is unpopular for obvious reason so the regime is struggling about future energy plan. Thanks (/s) to putin, nuclear is now re-evaluating. I feel Germans are more anti-nuclear. Why Japan encourages hydrogen is not very related to nuclear (except that the gov want to feed jobs to heavy industry companies that worked on nuclear), but related to lack of every local materials/fuels. I think hydrogen research should be encouraged, but Toyota should release more PHEV/BEVs early.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Any grid good enough to air condition every house in the day time is good enough to charge electric cars at night.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      There's already tons of available lines going to a ton of people's homes. It only took a dozen or so feet of cable to add a 14-50 outlet in my garage. Their homes were built expecting them to be able to pull 150-200A of power. It doesn't take that much power to charge an EV overnight. Mine charges way faster than it needs to on 32A 240V.
  - b112 4y ago
    Why do peopke always ignore the range, and specs, of the three separate car brand's H2 range, when making claims like this? You're wrong. And claims of energy loss!! Sure, no loss to heat in batteries? And batteries lose charge if they sit idle!
    - freemint 4y ago
      There is some loss in batteries but like we can measure things and hydrogen comes out way short in terms for miles driven per kWh of electricity in the grid.
      - b112 4y ago
        No, it doesn't. How do I know this? Because you haven't even specified where the h2 came from. There is power generation from Ng, and there is h2 from Ng. Which do you think is most effective? Ng -> steam generator -> power transmission -> charging loss Or, Ng -> h2, delivery, fuel cell (fuel cells are highly efficient) As an aside: https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicles/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-are-revving-to-go-but-theres-still-plenty-of-speed-bumps-ahead https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
  - 93po 4y ago
    Fueling stations are a solved problem. There are compact, modular, on-site hydrogen generators designed for installation in places like gas stations. I recently met the founder of this company: https://genh2hydrogen.com/ https://genh2hydrogen.com/ that is doing exactly this - they're currently taking pre-orders and looking for final funding, but they have the engineering and prototyping in place. The Department of Energy even offers interest-free 30 year loans for any stations that want to buy one.
    - martin_bech 4y ago
      That looks promising, but the costs are still way higher then putting in EV chargers, and you can set up EV charging at home, for almost no cost. Again the scale of hydrogen fueling stations needed would be massive
      - 93po 4y ago
        A quick Google shows that a Tesla supercharger installation is about $250k including the power grid infrastructure upgrades needed. The self contained hydrogen generator and fueling pump from H2 is about $2 million, but it's also interest free and can be paid over 30 years and the profits of it go to the operator, which isn't true of the Tesla superchargers. Larger and more popular gas stations can do about half a million in revenue per month selling gas, which they only have about 2% margin on. Hydrogen has the electric cost eating into margins, but even then it should be pretty profitable and much much higher than 2%. Although it's a big up front cost commitment, the economics definitely seem feasible if hydrogen fuel cell cars start getting more popular over the next decade or more.
        martin_bech 4y ago
        Thats yoyr problem right there.. its 10x the cost and only feasible if hydrogen cars become the norm, and hydrogen cars will not be the norm if no fillingstations are available. Meanwhile with an EV, I will never really need to visit a charging station, unless Im on a road trip.
Tade0 4y ago
If my recent gas mileage figure after 1h of mixed driving is to be believed, I could get to within 10% of that figure in my Toyota hybrid.
speedgoose 4y ago
If range was the only important thing, we would drive Citroen 2CV with spare cans of gaz in the trunk. But we don’t, and very few cares about the Mirai.
zoltar 4y ago
I wish there was more enthusiasm around this tech. The Hyundai N Vision 74 is the first concept car I've wanted to test drive in a long while.
pharmakom 4y ago
I really think the push for hydrogen (highly impractical at scale) by the right wing press is part of fossil fuel industry attempts to spread fud around battery evs.
- nl 4y ago
  I hadn't realised until very recently that most hydrogen produced comes from coal: https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/explainer-how-do-we-make-hydrogen-from-coal-and-is-it-really-a-clean-fuel-94911 https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/explain... Most of the time it isn't a green fuel at all and is just a way to keep mining coal.
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    Electrolysis powered by nuclear energy seems very clean and green to me. With the added benefit of not requiring an overhaul of the electrical grid to be able to handle everyone charging their cars.
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      Instead of overhauling the electrical grid, gas stations just have to maintain cryogenic pressure tanks?
      - smaudet 4y ago
        Exactly, my money would be on an inert storage format - if you could mass produce hydrogen and keep it around safely inert (with low energy cost to convert it back), EVs would be beat so bad in the long run it wouldn't even be funny... EVs are nice in short term but battery issues like these illustrate their (should be obvious) shortcomings. WRT to this battery technology, ironically the same sector being targeted by hydrogen might benefit, i.e. rail tech - if you stick a high number of cheap batteries onto a large, heavy motorcar, the energy differential is almost negligible as you make up for it in part through momentum, but also just scale (more passengers transported per watt, more charge available per trip).
b112 4y ago
http://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/1667/hydro-quebec-to-operate-one-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-electrolyzers-to-produce-green-hydrogen/ http://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/1667/hydro-que... This is just a start, Hydro Quebec will expand production if demand comes.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  The entire world is gearing up to produce green Hydrogen in staggering quantities. It won't be used for wheeled vehicles though. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/green-hydrogen-market https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/green-hydrogen-market
  - b112 4y ago
    A prediction is not what will be, and that's all a market projection is. Just a single government providing grants for h2 refueling infra can dramatically change things.
  - b112 4y ago
    https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicles/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-are-revving-to-go-but-theres-still-plenty-of-speed-bumps-ahead https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
- smaudet 4y ago
  I would buy one for my next vehicle (it will be a ways off), except my area will take a while to be covered, with the amount of driving I do I would not need to refill for several months, and I could still take it on cross country road trips without worrying too much about even stopping at a charge/gas station. As it stands, I will not be buying any EV, you will have a very hard time convincing me otherwise, too many drawbacks to not enough range, ridiculously high charge times, expensive battery repairs, in addition to not being much better than a gasoline vehicle as far as ECO costs.
  - b112 4y ago
SigmundA 4y ago
A Tesla model 3 hypermiled like this Mirai got 606 miles [1]. The Mira's normal range is about 400 miles. > you don't have the battery problem (at all). The Mirai still has a small lithium battery like a hybrid since fuel cells cannot put enough instantaneous power (only 128kw and has start up time) for normal driving they need a buffer battery that is recharged by the fuel cell. Since this battery is so small it can't benefit as much from regen like a normal BEV and has pretty poor performance as well (182hp). All this in a car that weighs more than an equivalent BEV due to heavy 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks and complexity with the fuel cell and buffer battery. I personally believe hydrogen is a dead end for automobiles, the end to end efficiency is much worse (creating and compressing hydrogen) vs just charging a battery not to mention the issues of storing a transporting hydrogen safely [2]. 1. https://electrek.co/2018/05/27/tesla-model-3-range-new-hypermiling-record/ https://electrek.co/2018/05/27/tesla-model-3-range-new-hyper... 2. https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydrogen-or-battery--that-is-the-question.html https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...
- _hypx 4y ago
  We will run out of batteries if we want to power every car on Earth with them. We will go with hydrogen instead because it is not going to run out.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are in fact better than gasoline. A fact that I think often gets overlooked. But note, they do actually have batteries, similar to ICE serial hybrids. They key thing of course, is that building lots of batteries is not a 'problem', and it's lack of being a problem is exactly why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport. The place where BEVs have yet to prove themselves is when energy density is absolutely critical. Long distance transport of any sort (air, sea, train, semi) is really the next places for them. Semi is a maybe at this point. Train MIGHT make sense, but, IMO it'll probably make the most sense as an energy capture/getting the train up to cruising speed aid rather than as the sole power source. Heck, for train, it'd make sense to instead electrify the rail system. Sea seems unreachable (Sails make more sense at this point which is sort of wild). Air, IDK, there are definitely projects to hit it, but I don't see a large commercial plane doing BEV. Perhaps for smaller regional hops it'll make sense.
  - hattmall 4y ago
    Why not electrify the road, at least highways, in part.
    - kortex 4y ago
      How? Rail at least provides a direct conductive path. Electrified highways would require inductive charging at 65mph (not feasible) or building overhead pantograph systems (expensive but at least vaguely tractable). Either requires specialized vehicles. Europe could pull it off due to its density, but the stretches of American highway which would benefit the most from it, would be a huge challenge.
      - hattmall 4y ago

snotrockets 4y ago

There were plans in Japan for wide use of hydrogen as the fuel of the future. Japanese car manufacturers aligned on that, but weren’t keen on building the necessary infrastructure. You could lease a hydrogen fuel cell car in CA. There was even a lot of state incentives if you did. But very few fueling stations (iirc, only two in the whole Bay Area)

martin_bech 4y ago
Because the infrastructure needed would be bonkers, and creating fuelibg stations is not really a solved problem. You also loose a big amount of energy converting from electric to hydrogen and back. The cars themselves almost always have low storage because the tanks are very big. Hydrogen car performance is also a lot lower then pure EV.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  The infrastructure needed to create a power grid for people to charge electric vehicles at home would be double-bonkers. Upgrading fueling stations seems much easier than mining all of the copper needed to add all of the extra lines for EV charging, and then upgrading the whole national grid. Supposedly one company has claimed 95% efficiency on creating hydrogen from electrolysis: https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electrolysis/ https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr... Power that by nuclear energy, and it's a green & clean winner.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    There are ancillary benefits to upgrading the grid that retrofitting pipes to pump hydrogen doesn’t bring. Most of America and Europe would do just fine without upgrades, for most of the population. And the jurisdictions touting hydrogen (e.g. Japan) have 70s-era anti-nuke greens in power. Hydrogen is a smart hedge to pursue. But thank goodness it’s mostly Japanese tax dollars doing it.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Current Japan regime isn't anti-nuclear but they are the regime that encouraged nuclear plants. Now nuclear is unpopular for obvious reason so the regime is struggling about future energy plan. Thanks (/s) to putin, nuclear is now re-evaluating. I feel Germans are more anti-nuclear. Why Japan encourages hydrogen is not very related to nuclear (except that the gov want to feed jobs to heavy industry companies that worked on nuclear), but related to lack of every local materials/fuels. I think hydrogen research should be encouraged, but Toyota should release more PHEV/BEVs early.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Any grid good enough to air condition every house in the day time is good enough to charge electric cars at night.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    There's already tons of available lines going to a ton of people's homes. It only took a dozen or so feet of cable to add a 14-50 outlet in my garage. Their homes were built expecting them to be able to pull 150-200A of power. It doesn't take that much power to charge an EV overnight. Mine charges way faster than it needs to on 32A 240V.
- b112 4y ago
  Why do peopke always ignore the range, and specs, of the three separate car brand's H2 range, when making claims like this? You're wrong. And claims of energy loss!! Sure, no loss to heat in batteries? And batteries lose charge if they sit idle!
  - freemint 4y ago
    There is some loss in batteries but like we can measure things and hydrogen comes out way short in terms for miles driven per kWh of electricity in the grid.
    - b112 4y ago
      No, it doesn't. How do I know this? Because you haven't even specified where the h2 came from. There is power generation from Ng, and there is h2 from Ng. Which do you think is most effective? Ng -> steam generator -> power transmission -> charging loss Or, Ng -> h2, delivery, fuel cell (fuel cells are highly efficient) As an aside: https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicles/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-are-revving-to-go-but-theres-still-plenty-of-speed-bumps-ahead https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
- 93po 4y ago
  Fueling stations are a solved problem. There are compact, modular, on-site hydrogen generators designed for installation in places like gas stations. I recently met the founder of this company: https://genh2hydrogen.com/ https://genh2hydrogen.com/ that is doing exactly this - they're currently taking pre-orders and looking for final funding, but they have the engineering and prototyping in place. The Department of Energy even offers interest-free 30 year loans for any stations that want to buy one.
  - martin_bech 4y ago
    That looks promising, but the costs are still way higher then putting in EV chargers, and you can set up EV charging at home, for almost no cost. Again the scale of hydrogen fueling stations needed would be massive
    - 93po 4y ago
      A quick Google shows that a Tesla supercharger installation is about $250k including the power grid infrastructure upgrades needed. The self contained hydrogen generator and fueling pump from H2 is about $2 million, but it's also interest free and can be paid over 30 years and the profits of it go to the operator, which isn't true of the Tesla superchargers. Larger and more popular gas stations can do about half a million in revenue per month selling gas, which they only have about 2% margin on. Hydrogen has the electric cost eating into margins, but even then it should be pretty profitable and much much higher than 2%. Although it's a big up front cost commitment, the economics definitely seem feasible if hydrogen fuel cell cars start getting more popular over the next decade or more.
      - martin_bech 4y ago
        Thats yoyr problem right there.. its 10x the cost and only feasible if hydrogen cars become the norm, and hydrogen cars will not be the norm if no fillingstations are available. Meanwhile with an EV, I will never really need to visit a charging station, unless Im on a road trip.

Tade0 4y ago

If my recent gas mileage figure after 1h of mixed driving is to be believed, I could get to within 10% of that figure in my Toyota hybrid.

speedgoose 4y ago

If range was the only important thing, we would drive Citroen 2CV with spare cans of gaz in the trunk. But we don’t, and very few cares about the Mirai.

zoltar 4y ago

I wish there was more enthusiasm around this tech. The Hyundai N Vision 74 is the first concept car I've wanted to test drive in a long while.

pharmakom 4y ago

I really think the push for hydrogen (highly impractical at scale) by the right wing press is part of fossil fuel industry attempts to spread fud around battery evs.

nl 4y ago
I hadn't realised until very recently that most hydrogen produced comes from coal: https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/explainer-how-do-we-make-hydrogen-from-coal-and-is-it-really-a-clean-fuel-94911 https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/explain... Most of the time it isn't a green fuel at all and is just a way to keep mining coal.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  Electrolysis powered by nuclear energy seems very clean and green to me. With the added benefit of not requiring an overhaul of the electrical grid to be able to handle everyone charging their cars.
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    Instead of overhauling the electrical grid, gas stations just have to maintain cryogenic pressure tanks?
    - smaudet 4y ago
      Exactly, my money would be on an inert storage format - if you could mass produce hydrogen and keep it around safely inert (with low energy cost to convert it back), EVs would be beat so bad in the long run it wouldn't even be funny... EVs are nice in short term but battery issues like these illustrate their (should be obvious) shortcomings. WRT to this battery technology, ironically the same sector being targeted by hydrogen might benefit, i.e. rail tech - if you stick a high number of cheap batteries onto a large, heavy motorcar, the energy differential is almost negligible as you make up for it in part through momentum, but also just scale (more passengers transported per watt, more charge available per trip).

b112 4y ago

http://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/1667/hydro-quebec-to-operate-one-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-electrolyzers-to-produce-green-hydrogen/ http://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/1667/hydro-que... This is just a start, Hydro Quebec will expand production if demand comes.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
The entire world is gearing up to produce green Hydrogen in staggering quantities. It won't be used for wheeled vehicles though. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/green-hydrogen-market https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/green-hydrogen-market
- b112 4y ago
  A prediction is not what will be, and that's all a market projection is. Just a single government providing grants for h2 refueling infra can dramatically change things.
- b112 4y ago
  https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicles/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-are-revving-to-go-but-theres-still-plenty-of-speed-bumps-ahead https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
smaudet 4y ago
I would buy one for my next vehicle (it will be a ways off), except my area will take a while to be covered, with the amount of driving I do I would not need to refill for several months, and I could still take it on cross country road trips without worrying too much about even stopping at a charge/gas station. As it stands, I will not be buying any EV, you will have a very hard time convincing me otherwise, too many drawbacks to not enough range, ridiculously high charge times, expensive battery repairs, in addition to not being much better than a gasoline vehicle as far as ECO costs.
- b112 4y ago

SigmundA 4y ago

A Tesla model 3 hypermiled like this Mirai got 606 miles [1]. The Mira's normal range is about 400 miles. > you don't have the battery problem (at all). The Mirai still has a small lithium battery like a hybrid since fuel cells cannot put enough instantaneous power (only 128kw and has start up time) for normal driving they need a buffer battery that is recharged by the fuel cell. Since this battery is so small it can't benefit as much from regen like a normal BEV and has pretty poor performance as well (182hp). All this in a car that weighs more than an equivalent BEV due to heavy 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks and complexity with the fuel cell and buffer battery. I personally believe hydrogen is a dead end for automobiles, the end to end efficiency is much worse (creating and compressing hydrogen) vs just charging a battery not to mention the issues of storing a transporting hydrogen safely [2]. 1. https://electrek.co/2018/05/27/tesla-model-3-range-new-hypermiling-record/ https://electrek.co/2018/05/27/tesla-model-3-range-new-hyper... 2. https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydrogen-or-battery--that-is-the-question.html https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...

_hypx 4y ago
We will run out of batteries if we want to power every car on Earth with them. We will go with hydrogen instead because it is not going to run out.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are in fact better than gasoline. A fact that I think often gets overlooked. But note, they do actually have batteries, similar to ICE serial hybrids. They key thing of course, is that building lots of batteries is not a 'problem', and it's lack of being a problem is exactly why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport.

cogman10 4y ago
> why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport. The place where BEVs have yet to prove themselves is when energy density is absolutely critical. Long distance transport of any sort (air, sea, train, semi) is really the next places for them. Semi is a maybe at this point. Train MIGHT make sense, but, IMO it'll probably make the most sense as an energy capture/getting the train up to cruising speed aid rather than as the sole power source. Heck, for train, it'd make sense to instead electrify the rail system. Sea seems unreachable (Sails make more sense at this point which is sort of wild). Air, IDK, there are definitely projects to hit it, but I don't see a large commercial plane doing BEV. Perhaps for smaller regional hops it'll make sense.
- hattmall 4y ago
  Why not electrify the road, at least highways, in part.
  - kortex 4y ago
    How? Rail at least provides a direct conductive path. Electrified highways would require inductive charging at 65mph (not feasible) or building overhead pantograph systems (expensive but at least vaguely tractable). Either requires specialized vehicles. Europe could pull it off due to its density, but the stretches of American highway which would benefit the most from it, would be a huge challenge.
    - hattmall 4y ago